# Ep 35: Pinburgh with Doug Polka **Source:** LoserKid Pinball Podcast **Type:** podcast_episode **Published:** 2020-05-15 **Duration:** 82m 37s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://zencastr.com/z/mYIIVILP --- ## Analysis Doug Polka, director of Pinburgh tournament and co-owner of Kickback Cafe in Pittsburgh, discusses the 2020 cancellation of Replay FX and Pinburgh due to COVID-19, the operational complexity of running a 1,000-player tournament, the evolution of Pittsburgh's competitive pinball scene from near-zero games on route to a thriving ecosystem, and the differences between the match-play Pinburgh format and the ticket-based Papa format. The episode covers game curation, setup philosophy balancing competitive difficulty with casual accessibility, and tournament logistics. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Replay FX and Pinburgh 2020 were cancelled due to COVID-19 stay-at-home orders preventing 2.5-3 months of preparation time required for the event — _Doug Polka, explaining the cancellation decision to podcast hosts_ - [HIGH] Pinburgh has grown from ~100-120 participants in its first year to 1,000+ participants, selling out in 15 seconds as of 2019 — _Doug Polka, discussing ticket demand and growth trajectory_ - [HIGH] There were no games on route in Pittsburgh in 2007-2008 when Doug entered competitive pinball; the route now operates ~60 games across the city — _Doug Polka, describing the evolution of Pittsburgh's pinball landscape_ - [HIGH] Pinburgh uses a mixed-era match-play format created by Bo Catalano, Karen Catalano, and Mark Steinman — _Doug Polka, crediting the original architects of Pinburgh_ - [HIGH] Replay Foundation owns ~600+ games and used over 400 games in Pinburgh 2019 alone; additional games sourced from local lenders and manufacturers like Stern — _Doug Polka, detailing Replay's game inventory and sourcing_ - [MEDIUM] Jurassic Park (Stern) is 'one of the best releases Stern's put out, maybe ever' and was new/untested before appearing in a tournament — _Doug Polka, opinion on Jurassic Park quality, noting initial hesitation to use it on stage due to untested code_ - [HIGH] Pinburgh's ticket resale policy prevents secondary market speculation; this was implemented after early years saw cancellations the day before the event — _Doug Polka, explaining the no-resale ticket policy rationale_ - [HIGH] Papa and Pinburgh formats are fundamentally different: Papa uses ticket-based (5-game) qualifying with division-specific banks; Pinburgh uses direct match-play head-to-head competition — _Doug Polka, comparing the two tournament formats_ - [HIGH] Replay FX is run by the Replay Foundation (nonprofit) with only 5 full-time employees plus contracted help near the event — _Doug Polka, discussing organizational structure and staffing constraints_ - [HIGH] Doug maintains a 4-year spreadsheet tracking game play times and difficulty by bank to inform future game curation decisions — _Doug Polka, describing data-driven approach to game selection and bank construction_ ### Notable Quotes > "Replay and Pinberg are very, very time intensive things to get ready for. When replay, you know, for one year ends about a week later, we start the preparations for the next replay. Like that's no exaggeration." > — **Doug Polka**, ~12:00 > _Explains the operational burden and why COVID-19 preparation loss forced cancellation_ > "I want to make sure that when you come in... everybody feels like they got their money's worth for what they paid to enter, no matter where you finished, whether they finished first overall or 1,000th overall." > — **Doug Polka**, ~21:00 > _Core philosophy: Pinburgh prioritizes experience for all players regardless of rank, not just winners_ > "This is going to hit a thousand people. And like, I was like, there's like, nah, competitive pinball isn't that big." > — **Doug Polka**, ~32:00 > _Doug's skepticism about growth; Bowen's prediction proved correct_ > "I almost always play a couple games of Jurassic Park just because I just really enjoy that game." > — **Doug Polka**, ~52:00 > _Personal endorsement of Stern's Jurassic Park as exceptional modern release_ > "The biggest problem that that created was that, well, we would give you a refund. Sure, that's not a problem. But now we have holes in the tournament when we knew we also had a lot of demand." > — **Doug Polka**, ~1:03:00 > _Origins of Pinburgh's non-transferable ticket policy to prevent last-minute cancellations_ > "We we only have five employees total and some other people that we contract when we get near the show." > — **Doug Polka**, ~14:30 > _Reveals small organizational size, highlighting constraints in scaling Pinburgh_ > "I don't think anyone can say that it's amazing because the machines are set up so right for their skill level." > — **Host (Scott Larson or co-host)**, ~19:00 > _Validates Pinburgh's game setup philosophy across all skill levels_ > "Pinberg obviously is match play. Everybody's playing at the same time. You're playing against three other people, so you're competing directly with other people." > — **Doug Polka**, ~56:00 > _Clear distinction between Pinburgh (direct head-to-head) and Papa (individual consistency)_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Doug Polka | person | Tournament director for Pinburgh, co-owner of Kickback Cafe in Pittsburgh, pinball route operator with ~60 games, involved in competitive pinball since 2007-2008 | | Pinburgh | event | Annual pinball tournament held in Pittsburgh, match-play format, grew from ~100 participants to 1,000+, part of Replay FX event, cancelled in 2020 due to COVID-19 | | Replay FX | event | Large pinball/arcade convention and tournament event in Pittsburgh, includes Pinburgh tournament, cancelled for 2020, rescheduled for 2021 | | Replay Foundation | organization | Nonprofit organization running Replay FX and Pinburgh, owns ~600 games, employs 5 full-time staff | | Mark Steinman | person | Co-creator of modern Pinburgh format (with Bo and Karen Catalano), director of Replay FX, involved in game selection for tournaments | | Bo Catalano | person | Co-creator of modern Pinburgh format with Karen Catalano and Mark Steinman | | Karen Catalano | person | Co-creator of modern Pinburgh format with Bo Catalano and Mark Steinman | | Steve Zumoff | person | Pittsburgh bar/establishment owner who asked Doug Polka to place pinball games on his South Side properties, started the routing operation | | Keith Elwin | person | Competitive pinball player; was early to play new Jurassic Park; created a deliberately difficult bank of four games for tournament play | | Zach Sharp | person | Competitive pinball player; was early to play new Jurassic Park before tournament availability | | Kickback Cafe | venue | Pinball cafe in Pittsburgh co-owned by Doug Polka, has a Jurassic Park machine | | Papa World Championships | event | Earlier Pittsburgh tournament using divisions (A, B, C, D) based on skill; used ticket-based format; being revived alongside Pinburgh | | Stern Pinball | company | Major pinball manufacturer; brought ~700 games to Replay FX events; created Jurassic Park machine praised by Doug | | Jurassic Park | game | Stern pinball machine released ~2019, highly praised by Doug Polka as 'one of the best releases Stern's put out, maybe ever', new/untested when first appeared at tournaments | | Scott Larson | person | Co-host of LoserKid Pinball Podcast, recently purchased Simpsons arcade cabinet, closing on new house with walkout basement | | Flippin' Out Pinball | business | Pinball service/supply business run by Zach and his wife Nicole Menny, sponsored/friendly with LoserKid Podcast | | Brad Hunter | person | Operator of Lit Frames business making pinball art frames; recently praised on Super Awesome Pinball Show | | Andromeda | game | Classic pinball machine featured in a Pinburgh finals bank, drove significant price increases on secondary market | | Alien Star | game | Classic pinball machine featured in a Papa or early Pinburgh finals bank, price increased after tournament visibility | | Doodlebug | game | Pinball machine used as a lesser-known showcase game in Pinburgh finals banks | | New York City Pinball Championship | event | Tournament organized by Levy; rented Replay Foundation games in 2019, was cancelled for 2020 | | InDisc | event | Pinball tournament using ticket-based format similar to Papa; competing tournament format | | Pittsburgh Penguins | organization | NHL team that rents pinball games from Replay Foundation for theme nights | ### Topics - **Primary:** COVID-19 and event cancellation, Pinburgh tournament operations and logistics, Pittsburgh pinball scene growth and history, Game curation and setup philosophy, Match-play vs. ticket-based tournament formats - **Secondary:** Ticket resale policy and community practices, Stern Jurassic Park machine quality and reception - **Mentioned:** Pinball route operations and venue management ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.75) — Doug is optimistic and proud about Pinburgh's growth and community impact, though sobered by the difficult 2020 cancellation decision. Hosts are supportive and enthusiastic. Some frustration about operational complexity and constraints, but framed constructively. No negativity toward competitors or the community. ### Signals - **[event_signal]** Replay FX and Pinburgh 2020 officially cancelled and rescheduled to 2021 due to COVID-19 preparation constraints (confidence: high) — Doug Polka: 'We're basically canceling replay effects slash Pinberg for this year, and we are going to reschedule for next year, obviously related to the COVID-19 pandemic going around.' - **[community_signal]** Pinburgh attendance has grown from ~100-120 initial participants to 1,000+ by 2019, with ticket sales accelerating (45 seconds to 15 seconds) (confidence: high) — Doug Polka: 'The first year, it didn't sell out until I think a few weeks before the event... But every year since then, it seems like the sellouts just get quicker and quicker and quicker.' Also: 'This year it's like 15 seconds.' - **[operational_signal]** Replay Foundation operates with only 5 full-time employees plus contract labor, which limits scalability for Pinburgh (confidence: high) — Doug Polka: 'We only have five employees total and some other people that we contract when we get near the show.' - **[design_innovation]** Modern Pinburgh introduced mixed-era match-play format designed to serve both competitive and casual players simultaneously (confidence: high) — Doug Polka: 'Mark and Bone put their heads together and came up with the mixed era match play format that we currently use for Pemberg.' - **[operational_signal]** Replay Foundation uses data-driven approach with 4-year spreadsheet of game times and difficulty to inform bank construction; games are playtested regularly despite storage (confidence: high) — Doug Polka: 'I actually have a spreadsheet with four years of data for how games are set up and how long they'll play... when I create new banks, I can actually kind of judge how long that bank is going to play based on actual data.' - **[product_strategy]** Pinburgh implemented non-transferable, non-resalable tickets to prevent secondary market speculation and last-minute cancellations (confidence: high) — Doug Polka: 'I love the idea of you can't buy a Pembert ticket and then turn around and sell it.' Problem: 'people would grab a spot and then they would be emailing us the day before the tournament saying they couldn't make it.' - **[venue_signal]** Pittsburgh pinball route grew from zero games in 2007-2008 to ~60 games operated across the city by 2020 (confidence: high) — Doug Polka: 'When I got into pinball and competitive pinball, like 2007, 2008, there were no games on route in the city of Pittsburgh... we operate 60 games throughout the city.' - **[sentiment_shift]** Stern Jurassic Park shifted from perceived as new/risky to highly regarded ('one of the best releases Stern's put out') (confidence: medium) — Doug Polka initially hesitant to stage it due to bugs/newness; later: 'That's one of the best releases Stern's put out, maybe ever... I almost always play a couple games of Jurassic Park just because I just really enjoy that game.' - **[competitive_signal]** Papa and Pinburgh serve different competitive philosophies: Papa rewards consistency across multiple games (ticket-based), Pinburgh emphasizes head-to-head direct competition (match-play) (confidence: high) — Doug Polka: 'Papa is a ticket based format... it tends to be a format that awards consistency... Pinberg is match play. Everybody's playing at the same time. You're playing against three other people.' - **[community_signal]** Pinburgh prioritizes inclusive experience for all 1,000 participants with equal care for lowest-ranked players, paying out 200 prize spots (confidence: high) — Doug Polka: 'We pay out 200 spots... I can tell you we put as much thought into the lowest ranked player having a good time as the you know as the keith ellens of the world.' - **[industry_signal]** Stern Pinball actively participates in events by donating/loaning machines for Replay FX, indicating strategic investment in tournament visibility (confidence: medium) — Doug Polka: 'Stern brought in a bunch of games last year for us.' --- ## Transcript Thanks for tuning in to the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. We are on episode number 35. With me, my co-captain as always, Scott Larson. Hey, Scott. Let's get some business out of the way really quick. We got some friends of the podcast that we want to shout out to first. Flip N Out Pinball. If you're looking for those sweet pinball needs, hit up Zach or his wonderful wife, Nicole Menny, and they will help you out. also Brad Hunter of Lit Frames. I don't know if you listened to the most recent episode of Super Awesome Pinball Show, but they were talking up Brad and his sweet frames, and we agree. They're fantastic. So if you want to get one of those Franchi prints and put it in a Lit Frame, hit up Brad. So what are you up to, Scott? Well, I actually almost broke my leg off the other day by putting my foot through a flatbed trailer when I was trying to load a bed up on it when we were trying to give it away, and there was a hole in the bottom. And so thankfully, it was just a really bad bruise. I did not break my knee. I did not break my femur. And I did not break my tibia and fibula. So I actually got out really lucky with just a bad bruise. And also, I bought a Simpsons four-player arcade game. And if you have not seen one of those or imagined having one of those in your house, I am surprised I did not bang up the walls getting it down because it is a beast. Just think of Wizard of Oz, but twice as big. and you showed me the pictures of your leg too and it's it's insane i can't remember if you put on your facebook but you got kind of ridiculed for that too so you know it's okay it's okay no good deed goes unpunished uh have you been up to anything fun lately um i finally played pinball for the first time in like two weeks last night and i did really well so that was nice uh we're almost closed on our house we should be in it by the end of the month so okay yeah i'm jealous that you actually have a walkout basement since I have the stairs of death. Not only to one entry, but two entries to the basement, man. I can go through the garage or I can go the back door. Yeah, I hate you so much right now. Let's bring the guest into this because he has a little more experience with moving a few games because he does, he is involved just peripherally in a tiny, small fringe tournament. So let's bring him in. So we have today on the show Doug Polka. How are you doing today, Doug? I'm doing good. How are you guys today? So let's give people a little bit of a background on you. You've been involved at least for over 10 years in the Pittsburgh competitive pinball scene. You have evolved into the director of Pinberg. You also have a, you're a co-owner of the Kickback Cafe and you told me you operate 60 games throughout the city. And so that seems like a pretty impressive resume when it comes to pinball. I do my part. A lot of that stuff, it's funny because like the route and stuff, that's not my full-time job. But like that basically came about because at the time I got into pinball and competitive pinball, like 2007, 2008, there were no games on route in the city of Pittsburgh. So basically one of the one of the gentlemen, his name, Steve Zumoff, owns owned a bunch of establishments on what's called the south side of Pittsburgh. It's like the the bar strip. And he asked if I want to put some games in some of his places and did that. And that's just kind of expanded from there. So and that seems really interesting. I I want to talk a lot about the the routing and being able to find ways of getting pinball to the masses. But first, you did talk about it on Pinball Profile and anybody who's involved in Pinberg and ReplayFX. You went through basically a big decision this year, which I think was heartbreaking for many, but it was, I would argue, from a public health standpoint, I don't think you had any alternatives. Why don't you talk about that and your decision to actually delay Pinberg for this year until next year? Yeah, so if your listeners are new to what happened, we're basically canceling replay effects slash Pinberg for this year, and we are going to reschedule for next year, obviously related to the COVID-19 pandemic going around. It basically came down to the fact that because of the stay-at-home orders in PA and everywhere, and I do understand why those are in place, I'm not complaining. we couldn't have any of the techs or anybody really at the facility preparing things for replay you know and when to start getting into you know two and a half three months lost to this the decision was pretty much made for us that we just weren't going to be able to be ready in time and then it was just a matter of uh mark steinman who's the director of replay reaching out to all of our you know, the convention center and the hotels and everybody we had contracts with and coming to some sort of agreement with them to be able to effectively cancel this year and reschedule for next year. That seems like a pretty tough decision to make, too. I mean, we're still, you know, we're at the end of May yet. And it seems like it's getting more and more divisive on, you know, people should keep move on with their lives and the other half are like stay at home. So was it just because we're still kind of the state we're in that you guys were like, well, we're just going to call it quits for now? Or was it just was there tension mounting from outside pressure, I guess, to put it? Oh, no, nobody from, you know, outside. I at least I haven't seen any pressure on us to do anything with it. It was more or less of the time we lost in terms for preparation because replay and Pinberg are very, very time intensive things to get ready for. Like when I tell people when replay, you know, for one year ends about a week later, we start the preparations for the next replay. Like that's no exaggeration. Uh, and then, you know, like even up to last year, we were, you know, the techs were working, you know, a couple of weeks before the show, they were still getting games ready for the show. Uh, it's really labor intensive as far as getting the games ready and preparing. And quite frankly, we're a pretty small organization. Um, replay effects is run by the replay foundation with it, which is a nonprofit. it. And we only have five employees total and some other people that we contract when we get near the show. So it's a lot of work for a small group of people. Yeah. And lead me through that. So you have exactly what is involved technically to actually get a game ready for Pinberg, because you're dealing with the best players. And we've talked about this, challenges with pinball, the better you are, the longer you play. And so you really have to set up a machine to increase the degree of difficulty because otherwise you'll have someone playing on it for 30 minutes. Yeah. So Pinberg is kind of unique in the fact that, so there was another event that we're bringing back next year, but we ran before Pinberg existed called the Poplar World Championships. The Poplar World Championships, when you would come in, you would enter a division suited to where you thought your skill level was. So there was A division, B division, C division. And the last year we ran it, there was a D division. And you could, so the A division games were insanely difficult, like set up as hard as you could perceivably set them up. B division, not as much. C division, not as much. With Pemberg, it's a little bit trickier to get them dialed in because number one, you're under time constraints. So when you come into Pemberg, you play a bank of four games And those four games need to be done before the next round is scheduled to start. Otherwise, you're going to push everything back. And Pinburgh, for as much as it is, you know, the biggest tournament in the world and probably the most prominent, you know, I don't want to step on anyone else's toes. Oh, don't be shy. It is the best tournament. A lot of people look forward to it every year. I don't want to sell anyone else short, though. But the thing with Pinberg is it's largely a casual tournament as well, right? So last year we had 1,000 people in there. And of those 1,000 people, how many of those are hardcore tournament players that travel to every tournament and want to get their butt kicked by a machine when they play it every time they play it? Probably not a lot. Like people come, you know, part of Pemburg is the social aspect of it. And yeah, everyone's there to compete and everyone's there to try and win because winning is obviously more fun than losing. But at the same time, our challenge as directors and my associate TDs is to get the game set up to a point to where they're hard enough to challenge the good players and not let them play forever. But easy enough so that everybody feels they had a fair shake at playing the game. so that's generally the the difficult part about setting up the pinbird games it's not just about making them as hard as you possibly can it's about finding that good balance between playability and still making it kind of difficult well that totally makes sense i mean you don't want people walking away from the tournament going like this was terrible like i hear a lot of people that go for the first time and i can't even fathom because your first pinball tournament is you a papa is you know replay effects and whatnot and so but i think it's awesome because i feel like everyone that walks away from that tournament feels they weren't done wrong because the machines are set up so right for their skill level i don't i don't think anyone can say that it's amazing yeah and that's that's a testament to how much work you know it's and it's not just me it's it's the whole team of tournament directors and the people that help us play test games and all that stuff put into getting those games as good as we can. There's always circumstances where people feel the game robbed them or whatever. And there are some games that we figure out a little late into the game that, oh, we set that up way too hard or we set that up way too easy. But one of the other nice things about Pinberg is the game doesn't necessarily have to stay set up the same way throughout the whole tournament because you're only playing against the people you're playing against for that one round. So if we do encounter a game that is playing exceptionally difficult, you know, that we didn't anticipate or a game that is playing exceptionally easy, we can always make adjustments in between rounds to that game as well. Yeah, and that reminds me, we talked to Bowen last year and he had talked about tournament pinball. And his point was, I don't really care about the people who are winning because they're going to have a, you know, they're competitive players. They come to all these tournaments all the time. And so if it's plus or minus, they're going to roll with the punches just because they like competing. He's like, I'm worried about the person who is 999th on the list out of a thousand because you still want them to enjoy their time playing, even if they are not up on stage. absolutely 100 percent and i can tell you we put as much thought into the lowest ranked player having a good time as the you know as the keith ellens of the world having a good time uh and that's why also like you know we we you can 20 of the people that enter pinberg win something you know we pay out 200 spots uh which is you know a lot if you've been to any other tournament and it's all about you know when people come and spend their money and for something like pinberg you're you're also taking a chunk of people's time right so you're taking thursday friday and saturday if they make the playoffs so a lot of people are literally planning vacations around this event uh and i just want to make sure that when you come in you know besides the tournament you know we also have everything else over in the show to offer but i want to make sure that Everybody feels like they got their money's worth for what they paid to enter, no matter where they finished, whether they finished first overall or 1,000th overall. They still had a good time. Considering when you talked about competitive pinball in Pittsburgh, around Pittsburgh, you said there really wasn't much to play. So lead me through. How did Pinberg become what it is? Because obviously you had Papa there, and so you had at least some sort of competitive pinball foundation. But it has exploded to 1,000 spots or over 1,000 spots, and you're still having more demand for it. So how did you build that scene if you didn't really have any place to play? So it actually started – it was the brainchild of Bo and Karen's and Mark Steinman, Pinberg. this round of Pinberg there were actually Pinbergs in Pittsburgh years ago that didn't run like this one did so modern Pinberg we'll call it so we were running the Papa World Championships in Carnegie at the Papa facility there and the basic thought was it would be you know because that was a big facility and it cost a lot of money just to keep there why don't we use this collection again and Mark and Bone put their heads together and came up with the with the mixed era match play format that we currently use for Pemberg. Basically, almost the same thing we're doing right now. A couple of things have changed. And immediately, you know, the first year, it didn't sell out until I think a few weeks before the event. And it was only maybe 100, 120 people. But every year since then, it seems like the sellouts just get quicker and quicker and quicker. And honestly, most of that is because of word of mouth. Like, the people really enjoy the match play format. Uh, and the way the tournament is run, we try and run it as professionally as possible. So I think that adds to it as well. And, you know, it just, every year it just sells out quicker and quicker and quicker. And it doesn't seem to, doesn't really seem to matter how many spots we add or, or, uh, or what we do to try and like, oh, maybe this will make a few people, you know, stay out of it or whatever. Um, just the, the demand for it is, is unbelievable. And we're really grateful for that. Well, that's got to put a smile on your face too. I mean, honestly, that's awesome that you've added more and more spots every year. And it's like it sells out faster and faster. It's even got to the point where pinball media is talking about it. Like, oh, last year was 45 seconds. This year it's like 15 seconds. And everyone's telling each other, you know, don't fret. You can do this and that. You know, make sure you're on the waiting list and refresh at the 15-minute mark. It's like everyone's learned the Konami code and they're like, we've got to input this now. So that way if you really want to get in, you do this, you know. yeah so it's just become uh it's it's a little bit of a pinball holiday almost the the most stressful day for some people is like the day that pemberg tickets go on sale yeah because you know we hear both sides of it that day we get the people that are super excited that they got in and then we get the people that you know have been shut out because of the the uh the unbelievable demand for it. When we started doing Pimberg at Replay, we actually, that was the year we went to 600. And I remember, I distinctly remember sitting down and having conversations with Bowen and Mark about like, how far do we think we could, you know, push this because we moved into the convention center. So space was no longer an issue. And I think Bowen was the first one to say, you know, this is going to hit a thousand people. And like, I was like, there's like, nah, competitive pinball isn't that big. There's no way we're ever going to get a thousand people in there. So to hit that milestone and actually see it sell out as fast as it did last year in 2018, when we went to a thousand people, it was just, it was, you know, like I said, we're very grateful and it's, it's flattering that so many people put their faith in our organization to run a high level tournament that they're going to come and spend their money. And they're going to, you know, cause most people are traveling, they're going to spend that money to travel or whatever to come and enjoy something that we're doing. That is challenging, though. You have so many games. And you mentioned last year on Buffalo, you said you have 600 games. Is that still about where you are? So last year, I think at replay, we had close to 700 total games. And that would, you know, because we get people locally that lend us games for the show. and Stern brought in a bunch of games last year for us. Papa itself, the actual replay foundation, we own almost, I think we're just over 600. I think we just hit the 600 mark last year is the number of games that we actually own. I contribute a lot of my games to the show as well. Like anything that I don't have out on location goes to replay, sometimes in Pembroke, sometimes in the free play area. Last year, I think after it was all said and done between all the games that we rotated in and out off the show floor, whatever, we used over 400 games in Pembroke alone. So that actually begs the question. A lot of these games, are they being played regularly? Because if they're at your storage facility, if you're firing something on every six months or so, how do you know it's still going to keep playing? So our techs basically, shortly after one replay ends, I develop the banks for the following year. So we'll shuffle the games around. We'll maybe try and include some games we couldn't include before, trying to keep – because to go into probably more detail than anybody wants to know, once we get the game set at headquarters, the techs will start going through them one by one. And a few months after they start going through them, we start to hold basically playtesting sessions where we'll invite a bunch of people over. We'll play, basically we'll do a strikes tournament there because we can group people in four groups of four. Because like with the EMs, you need to make sure, do the players kick over, do all the score reels work. And then the people that come to the events, basically as we're running the event, will come and tell me, well, you know, this light is burned out or this wasn't working or that wasn't working. And then we'll compile a bunch of notes and then the techs will go back and revisit those games. So they are sitting there, but they also get played. Another thing we do during that is we'll time each round and we'll time how long each game takes for like the groups to finish. And I actually have a spreadsheet with four years of data for how games are set up and how long they'll play so that when I create new banks, I can actually kind of judge how long that bank is going to play based on actual data I have as opposed to, I don't think that's a long playing game or that's a long playing game. So at this point, making the banks has become easier than it was when we first started doing it just because I have the years and years of data now. But they sit there, but they also don't sit there. That's a really long way to answer that really simple question. Well, I think that makes sense because if I show up to Pittsburgh in January, I can't just call you up and say, hey, I want to go to Papa. That's just not really that type of – it's not like the – it's not like going to Logan's Arcade or Sunshine Laundromat or something like that. It's not – Right. It's not a retail location. We do do rentals and there's a couple tournaments like New York City Pinball Championships. Levy and his team leveraged us last year to bring a bunch of games up there and we were going to do it this year, but sadly it was canceled. So we do some game rentals. We do game rentals around Christmas a lot for businesses in the Pittsburgh area The Pittsburgh Penguins rent games off of us for some of their theme nights So we do stuff like that as well But the games sit there but they still we kind of make sure they all get played regularly. Yeah, well, that's good. It's like a car. You have to, you can't just let a car sit because otherwise it's not going to work. Right, if we just pulled all the games out and brought them into the convention center and turned them on, I can only imagine what a nightmare that would be. what what is your favorite bank of four that you have constructed oh god i don't think i could even answer that there's been so many um every year there has to be one that you just laugh at though you're like this is either this is hilarious or this is awesome so Keith Elwin actually created a bank one year um i think it was when we were doing our Papa TV Kickstarter, something where you could basically pick your own bank of games with our approval. I can't remember. Keith's games were Ready Aim, Fire, but literally, Dragon, he picked the worst games. He put together a bank that was literally the least fun you could have playing pinball bank. I try not to do that. I try and put at least a game or two in every bank that people recognize. The most fun I have is actually picking the games that will be on the final stage because every year we try and get together and pick one or two games that aren't really known in the community as being great games or great players or whatever and showcase them like Doodlebug or games like that. And then we like to watch the prices on Pinside go through the roof. Right. Well, Andromeda was one of those. Andromeda. Yeah, I had heard of it. And then it's like, oh, well, that's what I want to buy now. Yeah. that's a really good example of one. Alien Star was another one. We did that in one of the either one of the early Papas or one of the Pinbergs. Mark picked up that game and he's like, this game is amazing. And then we put it in a finals bank and then all of a sudden everyone had to have an Alien Star. Whereas like a month before, nobody even knew what it was. Now, you had to smile a little bit since last year you put the classic Jurassic Park on stage. yeah uh that was uh i think that was bowen's idea actually i think he said oh let's do jurassic park and i said uh that game's too new i don't really trust it on the stage we don't know you know we don't know if there's bugs or anything because that was it basically debuted at replay like brought a bunch there and i said i don't really trust it to put you know that there isn't some kind of flaw and then there's the the competitive thing like like it was the first anybody that had chance to play it except for Keith Elwin and Zach Sharp. And, you know, what if they end up on it? Then it seems like an unfair advantage. But, yeah, I thought it was actually pretty funny. He's like, no, no, classic Jurassic Park. And I'm like, that is perfect. Well, that's hilarious, though, because Keith went to InDisc and got his butt handed to him on a Jurassic Park, you know. But do you, I mean, bringing it up now, obviously with the game the way it is, you're going to have in the tournament, aren't you? Oh, I love that game. That's one of the best releases Stern's put out, maybe ever. I don't like to speak in absolute terms, but it's one of the few games when I step in to kickback, we actually have one there, I almost always play a couple games of Jurassic Park just because I just really enjoy that game. Oh, it's fantastic. Yeah, I'm still waiting for things to loosen up a little bit so they'll either make more so I can get a hold of one or I can buy my friend's LE, which is a mile away, but it's too far away. I need to have it in my house. So let's transition a little bit. Let's talk about Papa. You said that we talked about it before. You are bringing back the original, you know, the Papa tournament, not the replay tournament, the Papa tournament. So you're using similar games and you're having similar players who are going to be entering both of those. So, this is your high school essay. Compare and contrast. What is the difference between Papa and Pinberg? And give me why you should do one versus the other. I would never. I'd never want to pick one baby over the other one. They're both very different, though. Obviously, Pinberg is match play. Everybody's playing at the same time. You're playing against three other people, so you're competing directly with other people. I think that's the biggest draw to that is like you're only competing every round against the three people that are there competing against you. So it's very tangible how well you're doing. Papa is a ticket based format, which people, you know, Papa's been gone for a few years because we put it on hiatus while we were trying to get replay effects off the ground because that was a lot of work. and a lot of people know the Papa format, ticket format, as the in-disc format because that's basically what in-disc does. So you basically get a ticket where you play five games and then the sum of that ticket goes against everybody else. So it tends to be a format that awards consistency versus like a best game format where you play one game and you can play it as many times as you want and you just put your best score and that's the only one that counts. Where Papa is different than replay beyond the obvious match play There's generally a bank of, I think the last one we did had 12 games in the bank We separate out the divisions So like A, B, C, and D all have their own banks So you're not playing the same games as the A players B isn't playing the same games as the A players So that's a little bit different than I think how InDisc does it But it's more of a I think the qualifying is more of a battle against yourself than it necessarily is against everybody else. Because it's being able to step up to a game and perform and put up a good score and then immediately do it again. And then immediately do it again. And then immediately do it again. Whereas Pinberg, you can have a bad game and you can still have a good record for that round. You can take a zero and still have a good record overall for that round. whereas in Papa, depending on which division you're playing in, if you're playing in A division and you put three bad games on your ticket, that's not going to be your qualifying ticket. You're just not going to have a high enough point total. So they both have their draws. Pinberg obviously is on a schedule, so you have to be there at certain times. Papa is more casual in the sense that you can kind of drift in and out as you want. You can come in, play a ticket, and then go do something else if you want. so they're they're pretty different in terms of the format with it being canceled now how can people get tickets for next year because obviously people were so excited for this year and they're looking to 2021 what can they do to uh sustain a spot i guess and you're talking about pinberg right josh correct yes so pinberg which is part of replay fx um you can go on the website replay AFX.org. And if you already have a ticket to Pinberg, you're already in for this year. You don't have to do anything. If you want to come next year, your ticket is automatically going to transfer over. There is a form on that website if you want to cancel, like if the date change doesn't work for you, or maybe you're just in a different financial position than you were six months ago, which is entirely possible given what's going on. You can go and request 100% refund for, I think, another week or so is how long that's running for. And tickets are on sale or tickets aren't on sale for Pinburgh because Pinburgh obviously is sold out. But you can go on there and join the waitlist. And as spots free up, we basically contact the people on the waitlist to fill the tournament back up. Okay. And that sounds good. How long is the waitlist right now? Do you know? I honestly don't have the number that's on it currently because I don't manage that part of the website. I know it's at least two or three hundred people because that's what it was a couple months ago. I would imagine it will grow a little bit, too, with the fact that, you know, there are going to be people that weren't going to go this year but wanted to go next year. And obviously we're not going to be open selling tickets for next year. So they can, you know, jump on the wait list that way. We are looking at ways to see if we can possibly expand the field next year. Can't really promise anything like right now, the biggest stressors on us right now are the games and the volunteers we need to do it. So if there's a viable way that we can add people, we're going to try and add people. But we also want to be cognizant of the fact that like, We don't want to ruin the experience of the tournament or cut down on text or anything like that just because we can't find them, but we wanted to increase the size of the tournament. So your best bet right now is to get on the wait list because even if we add people to the tournament, they're going to be added through the wait list. So I love the idea of you can't buy a Pembert ticket and then turn around and sell it. Who came up with the idea? Because you guys have been doing this for so long. Was that an issue in the beginning? Actually, the biggest issue I remember having the first two years of Pinburgh was people would grab a spot and then they would be emailing us the day before the tournament saying they couldn't make it and they wanted a refund. And the biggest problem that that created was that, well, we would give you a refund. Sure, that's not a problem. But now we have holes in the tournament when we knew we also had a lot of demand for the tournament. So we knew we could have filled those holes, but this person wasn't giving us enough time to fill that hole. Also, I mean, I specifically remember, I'm not going to mention who it was, But there was a player who was coming from Europe who called the Papa facility the morning of Pinberg saying he couldn't make it and wanted a refund. And we're like, well, I would assume you knew this before this morning, being that you live in Europe. So that's why the whole refund situation got put into place. And then as the demand grew to what it was, you know, with having that waitlist in place, we didn't want to make it possible for people to skip around the waitlist. It really wasn't so much about, you know, people making money off scalping tickets or anything like that. It was more, you know, here are the people that got in line and we want to make sure they have the opportunity to get a ticket and not just because they know somebody. And we didn't want people just hoarding tickets because, you know, they would just give them out to whoever. We wanted to make sure there was at least a process in place so that, you know, even if you missed out on tickets, if you went and jumped on the wait list, there's still a pretty good shot you're going to get in. That's so awesome, though, because like prices nowadays for pinball and whatnot. I mean, obviously, you've seen they've went up just a little bit. So I wouldn't put it past anyone to buy up all the Pimber tickets and say, right, now if you want to get in, I will sell you a ticket. Reseller websites like they do for concert tickets, yeah. Okay, so we – in the past, we actually one year – I want to say it was three or four years ago, we were doing a fundraiser for Path of Play, which is a charity that Mike Primo runs up in Canada, deals with helping autistic kids and their families through like playing board games and pinball and video games and that kind of stuff. But we actually auctioned off a pair of tickets. And I think they went for like $500 or something at the time. Like it, we all, it was all donated to charity and it was through us. But yeah, I mean, I, you know, if, if we left it open market, I'm sure people could market up secondhand and still sell it, you know, and more power to them if they do that. Like, but we just wanted to make sure we had a official process for which you had to go through. And we also want to make sure that people aren't being exploited. Like the cost of the event is this and this is what we want you to pay to get in. Right. And I think that's nice that it doesn't make it a it's not an exclusive thing. It's like if you really want to, you can save up some money and you can pay for the ticket. It's not cost prohibitive. It may be easier for some people than others. But if you are – it doesn't matter if you're a high-income person or a low-income person. If you really wanted to, you could budget for the $100 entry and the $125 ticket. You can do that. And you're not going to be limiting it to just people who have higher-paying jobs. And so I really like that. Yeah, and I mean that's obviously part of the discussion about going back to making it a tournament for everybody as opposed to a tournament for a few people. You also have to balance – you try and balance the need between demand and making it unobtainable for people to be able to afford to come do it. Because honestly – and we've had these discussions. Could we charge $250 for just a Pinburgh ticket? Probably, and we'd probably sell a lot of them. but it's not really something that we want to do. We want to make sure it's attainable for most people that want to come and experience this at least once. To the other side of that, we've actually had conversations about if we could find bigger and bigger sponsors for being able to cut the price to make it less to get in, if we could find sponsors to help repopulate the prize pool with money that we would be losing because of that. that hasn't happened of course but we can always dream not yet okay there's two things i really want you to do though is i want you to tell uh when the tournament is going to be next year so people can start looking at their calendar and another thing i want you to talk about is considering this was a this is a big decision um there's a lot of financial fallout ramifications but there should be ways that people merchandise or things that they can buy to help offset this because it's not like you guys are making money this year. And so could you cover both of those things? Sure. The dates for next year, first of all, are August 12th through 15th, 2021, of course. The reason those dates were picked was basically because the convention center, because so many dates have been pushed to next year, they had a very small selection for Mark to be able to choose from. So it's later in the year than it – it's usually around the last weekend in July. to the first weekend in August. It's later than it's ever been on its current schedule, but that's why it is the August 12th through 15th. If you want to support the Replay Foundation outside of that, honestly, one of the biggest things you could do is if you don't have your ticket just to get into the show for next year, go buy that now. You can go buy that now. The cost is, I think it's $100 for a four-day pass, and that obviously helps us out greatly. We also have an online store at replayfx.org if you want to go and buy a T-shirt or something like that. If you have the ability to do that right now and you want to support the Replay Foundation, go buy a T-shirt. Go buy a ticket to the show. Those are really easy ways. And you can still get a little bit of something back. Other passive ways you can support our foundation, let's say you're not in the position to spend any money right now, which I know there are a lot of people that are probably in that position. go to YouTube, watch some of our videos. We get a little bit of income from every time somebody watches a video. We also have a Twitch stream, Papa TV Pinball. Every Tuesday night, we're actually right now we're showing replays, but a lot of our gang is in there chatting up with viewers because right now we can't go into our warehouse and film new stuff. But those are two ways that you can also help the Replay Foundation without actually spending any of your money. well those videos i mean are fantastic like that is how i found a better appreciation love for this hobby it's through bow and karen's doing tutorials for pinball machines that i was playing on the pinball arcade on my phone and so it was awesome to type in it was like well you know i want to see the getaway and wow there's a video for it you know and so i encourage anyone if you want to learn more about a pinball machine or see some wonderful exploits one of my favorite is the shadow when uh bowen starts blowing it up by the the left orbit to the the inner loop yes oh it's hilarious watching it where are all these points coming from holy cow yeah so yeah bowen and mark basically collaborated on the tutorial things. It was actually Mark Steinman's idea to create. We also have a huge database of gameplay videos, which are just literally a top-down shot of somebody playing a game. And the reason that those started was because when we started doing our YouTube stuff and we started filming games, there wasn't a lot out there. Like if you wanted to watch some obscure game or maybe you saw a game for sale on Mr. Pinball Classifieds, but you'd never seen it before and you didn't know if it was any good, we wanted to provide kind of a reference. Like you could do a search on YouTube and here's a video of somebody playing it. And then, of course, Bone's tutorials are fantastic. Like he's literally, I couldn't think of anyone better to do those because it's entertaining, he's funny, and obviously he knows a lot about the games. Unfortunately, those are also on hold being filmed right now because of everything going on. But our Papa TV producer, James Coons, actually has some ideas first to add a few bells and whistles to the upcoming ones once we can start filming them again. Okay, I'm going to do a confessional right now, and I hope you find this hilarious. So I ran into a neighbor that owned a Ripley's, believe it or not. and I'd watched tons of the tutorial videos with Bowen well I look up and you guys have one for Ripley's believe it or not and I'm like sweet so I start watching it and it's not Bowen and I'm like who the crap is this guy and it's Keith Elwin and I'm just like man this guy doesn't I don't know who he is he's kind of bland doing this video like he's no Bowen it's so funny to look back now and be like oh my goodness that was Keith Elwin But back then, like, who the crap is this guy? Like, who does he think he is? Okay, well, and is Keith really good at pinball? I'm not really sure. I just, I don't know. I never heard of the guy before. No, yeah, but, and there's lots of that stuff out there now. So that's kind of what's great about it, right? It's like there's so many people that do streaming and there's so many people that stream tournaments and there's people that make their own, you know, world video breakdowns and stuff. Like, it's a completely different world from when, you know, 10 years ago when we started doing this stuff to like, you can find, you know, you can almost type in any pinball machine name into the YouTube search and find some kind of video about it, which is, which is awesome. Yep. It is totally awesome. The only, the only video I have not liked, and this has nothing to do with you guys is, uh, the amazing Spider-Man by Gottlieb. That was my, one of my first pinball machines. I started watching that video and you, the whole video is just tap passing it's just you know doing the passes back and forth up to the alleys i'm like what the crap is this what what i can't do that this video is pointless to me it's the dumbest video ever i so i want to talk a little more about the tech support you guys have you are obviously you know how to have a machine that is well run and well tuned in and tell me a little bit is it possible for you guys to start this is my big bandwagon that i trying to get people on board to be able to have like a library at least a searchable library of oh you know what if you're getting into pinball and you've never taken the glass off and you've never uh gone underneath the hood these are the top five things you need to start with so this is uh level one type of maintenance stuff well here's level two well here's maybe a level 10 that you so you want the other stuff. Have you considered trying to do that and maybe recording some of those things so people can start maintaining their own games? So actually, that ties in a little bit with the logistics of what it takes to run Pinberg. So a few years ago, as we expanded Pinberg, we realized we were running out of techs that we could get to volunteer to tech Pinberg. And Eitan Goldman, who's one of the people that helps out with the show, came up with the idea of running basically tech classes. And the idea behind the tech class is we're going to invite people into Papa. You're going to be taught by, you know, our technicians or, you know, somebody who's really skilled. There's a lot of collectors in the Pittsburgh area as well. They're going to teach you, you know, the basics and then even got into some more advanced things about doing pinball repair. So we would have classes where you could sign up and you could come in and you could take the classes. and we created a bunch of new text out of it, which is awesome. I know last year that that group started filming some of their work. We haven't really followed up on it since then. I know that the long-term plan is to basically create a video library of basic pinball repair. Obviously, with everything going on now, there's not much we're doing in the manner of filming. But as we refine the curriculum for the tech classes, part of doing that is to boil it down to what are the essential things we need to know to put together a video on how to rebuild WPC flippers or even something as simple as how do I clean and wax my pinball machine. So that stuff is on our roadmap to create. and I know there's other people out there doing some stuff like that. I know that Marco has recently started putting out some repair videos, but the idea behind ours, we're going to be trying to focus on a specific task as opposed to let's dive into this pinball machine and see what's broke. So it's on the roadmap. I don't really have a time frame for when that's going to occur, though. Well, that's still a good idea, though, because when I first got my Amazing Spider-Man from Gottlieb and I'm trying to find videos of, you know, repair stuff. There was one that kept reoccurring that I kept finding was most of those got leaps had a grounding issue. And so it was hard because a lot of other people had different ways to do the grounding issue, you know, do it this way or do it that way. And so it's a good idea, especially for those older machines that have specific issues to that machine. You should go make that video and say, hey, this is how you do it. Call it good. Yeah, and the danger, if this stuff isn't recorded and preserved, is that it gets forgotten, right? Because, I mean, just facts being facts, even with us being in another golden age of pinball right now, there's not as many techs as there was even 20 years ago that can actually jump into any kind of machine and fix anything. and our head tech at Papa is named Steve Eckert. He's a legend amongst us and he should be a legend to everybody. He actually came from, he worked for a large distributor called Betson and they had games on route and that's where his experience came from. And every time I talked to that man, I learned something new about fixing a machine. And he's the guy that we leaned on for years and years and years. Like even with my own games, like something would not be working right and I'd go to him and I'd say, you know, this is doing this. And he'd be like, well, did you check this, this, this, and this? And he would rattle off like four game specific things on that machine that you specifically have to do because he's been doing it for so long. He's got all that knowledge locked up. So, you know, he's one of the people that we had, you know, going to help us do the pinball tech classes. And hopefully we'll be able to get some of that type of knowledge recorded for posterity because in some cases, once some of that stuff's gone, it's just going to be gone, you know, and people are just going to have to find it out for themselves. Yeah, it seems a little bit like Zach Sharp had talked about the tribal knowledge of pinball in Chicago, and I would imagine the same thing. There's a tribal knowledge on the tech support side that you just get through experience, and unless there's a way that we can pass that on to the current generation or future generations, it's just going to go into the ether. Yeah, and I think we all want, you know, I've gone from, I remember when I first got into pinball, I didn't like to even consider playing older games. Oh, you want to play that EM? Like, really? Like, okay. You know, there's a Twilight Zone over there. Why don't we go play Twilight Zone instead? Because I didn't appreciate what those games had to offer. Now I've kind of 180, and my personal preference when I walk in somewhere is usually, oh, let's play, you know, let's go play Target Pool, or let's play Alien Star, or let's play Cosmic Gunfight. as opposed to let's play Attack from Mars or Twilight Zone. Not that they're not good games, but it's just a different experience. I personally have gained a lot of appreciation for those since I started in the hobby. And I think that's almost the arc that most new collectors take as well. As I talk to people, they only want to play the newest game, the newest game, the newest game. But then as people convince them to play some of the older games, they realize that there's a lot of fun to be had in some of the simplistic natures of it. And honestly, quicker ball time sometimes. can be a lot more fun than having to wait 20 minutes for your friend to finish his ball on Lord of the Rings before you get to play again. It is funny how that works, too. It's like, I swear, everyone that gets into the hobby always finds the ballets first, the 90s games, or they find new Sterns, Deadpool, Jurassic Park, whatever it may be. And that's the hot stuff, man. You can't convince them otherwise. Like, this is the coolest thing ever. And then as they start getting deeper into the hobby, it's like they start reverting back to those older games. They start finding the early sterns that have been overinflated by certain podcasters. Sorry, I just had to say that. And then even those early ballets. I mean, there's something about 8-Ball Deluxe. And it's like most people would hate that game from the beginning because it's like you're shooting a drain monster. But once you start learning those flipper skills and once you start figuring out how to nudge and stuff like that, games like those older games are just fun to do because it's almost like an adventure. Like I get all the new games are like an adventure and immersion and world under glass, blah, blah, blah. Those older games are just something about the environment. It's just – it draws you in and it's just a little – it makes the simplicity, but it's wonderful. to me too and i've used this when talking to other people the older games and i by the way this is not a rant on newer games sucking i love a lot of the newer stuff that's come out and i'm definitely definitely a huge fan of the 90s bally williams stuff because that was the stuff that was available to play when i was growing up uh for me the older games seem a little bit more personal um as a collector when i was specifically collecting like i was i'm one of the people that when I go buy a game, if it has initials carved into the head of it, like it makes it more valuable to me because I like the history. I like the fact that this thing has battle scars from being on route. And then, you know, how many people played this game in some smoky bar or some arcade somewhere. And like that stuff is just like, like you can't replicate that, you know, a perfectly restored machine has its own, you know, its own place and its own, you know, space in the hobby. I love older games that are just, you know, have a little bit of wear. You've got a little bit of wear around the inserts. And it's just because, you know, over the life of this game, this shot has been somebody's hit that orbit 10,000 times, you know, and those older games, they just seem more personal to me than the newer games do. Oh, yeah. If that makes sense. Yes, it does. To me, It does, yes. I think there seems to be a less barrier to entry, too. If you see some strange game that you haven't seen that was from the 70s or 60s, you can go up and you can actually understand it quickly. And so there's a steeper learning curve in that you get competent faster at these older games. But that doesn't make them less challenging. In many ways, it's the same thing as the video games that I grew up. there's a reason why the nintendo games that i had growing up they really weren't that deep but they were super hard so you still did the same level over and over again because you had to do it perfectly now um those games you couldn't do the same thing with modern games because people want different things but there is some sort of appreciation for the older ones i totally get what you're saying so you're telling me that uh the beatles isn't making millions of dollars right now off of their pinball machine what are you trying to say scott i i i am on the record and saying that i would take a beatles today because i think it's a great layout and i actually love every time i played the the beatles i love it and so it i think it got a bad a bad rap just because it was the extra markup for the for the license but um i haven't seen the game the game itself is really fun to play. Obviously, it's a proven layout, too, and the changes they made to the layout make the game better. That game's a lot of fun, and you're right when you say, I think, in the collector community at least, it got a bad rap because it was expensive. I'm sure there's a reason for that. For what people can afford what they can afford. Hopefully, nobody's buying something they can't afford. But I don't think necessarily a price is a reason to dislike a game. I didn't buy one. I have a route, and I didn't buy one because I thought it was too much for what I was going to get back when I looked at it from a business perspective issue. But whenever I see one, I'm going to play it. I think it's a lot of fun. Well, what's interesting, too, I decided to go look at the price of one of these up this last week. And those gold editions, so essentially the base one, they're in that $5,000 to $6,000 for the resellable used value. And I find it interesting that everyone complains about price and whatnot, and I don't think that's a bad price at all. If I could find one for $52 or $53, like it says on Pinside, which Pinside's gospel, it would be hard to turn one down. That's a fantastic game. It really is. Yeah, if someone wants to sell it, contact me. uh we'll ship it out good uh good price and uh you know a nicely loved i'm actually yeah i i really am in the market for looking for a beatles it looks great he's a big yoko ono fan she's not in the game she's not in the game i hate to disappoint you she's there in spirit okay in that two of them are dead yes i got it so Oh, I apologize. So, Doug, you've got to tell me, you know, you got into this back in the 90s just as a recreational player and started enjoying the hobby. How did you go from that to overseeing and helping with one of the biggest pinball tournaments in the world? So I'll condense my journey down as quickly as possible because I'm sure a lot of people have similar stories. 90s, you know, played in the arcades, fell in love with pinball then. And then it was all about, you know, going off to school and starting a career and doing all that stuff. So pinball didn't exist. And then it was actually a local player named Al Topka. We were actually playing poker at the time, going around and playing poker a lot. And I went to pick him up or meet him at his house. And he had games in his basement. He had pinballs in his basement. I was like, oh, my God, like you got pinball machines in your basement. Like, I think he had the getaway and Twilight Zone and like games that I remember playing. And I was like, this is like the most amazing thing ever. And he's like, oh, yeah, you can buy these. And I'm like, where can you buy this stuff? Like, and this was before the days of, you know, you being able to walk into a distributor and get a pin. And he knew some people and he knew some ops in the area. And he actually helped me buy my first pin, which was a Jurassic Park, a Data East Jurassic Park, which I bought for $600 because stuff was cheap back then. Holy crap. Because nobody wanted them. I mean, it wasn't a big deal to be collecting pins because people weren't really collecting them, but on a really small group of people. And from there, you know, I acquired acquired some more games. He eventually said, hey, you should come out and play in some tournaments. You know, one of the world's biggest tournaments actually in Pittsburgh. And I was like, no way. The first pop I went to, I didn't play. I just walked around the facility for three days and played every game they had because we had they had like 400 games there. And then after that, I started playing, but I wasn't I never really got into like the hyper competitive stuff just because like for me personally, I'm a sore loser and I know that and I'm very hard on myself when I lose. So I only want to play if it's in a super casual setting to kind of step back from that. I started volunteering there. I volunteered as a tech for a few years. And then that's about when Mark Steinman took over as director. And then he asked me if I wanted to come on and help run the events. And I was like, heck, yeah. So started doing that. And then I put a couple of games on location, like I said, and one of the local bar owners had asked me about that. So I started doing that as well because that was also I was one of the people to help start the Pittsburgh Pinball League. and we were running out of places to actually play because we played on location and just being able to put some more games around the city made it so that we could play some more and grow our league. I remember like the first or second year of our league, we had like seven people and now we're consistently over like 100, 150 people every year. So that's kind of awesome as well. So what game is your go-to game right now? uh my favorite game right now at this very moment yeah uh jurassic park's probably the game i like to play more than any of the new games um my go-to for all time though is target pool which is an old gottlieb wedge head uh that i found you know i won't say i found it but i found the enjoyability in playing it years and years ago uh and basically that rose about because when when you're down at poppa and you're getting ready for an event uh you know you're moving stuff around you're working really hard for a couple hours and then you'll take a quick break to play a game you don't normally jump onto a new game you'll jump onto an old game because you you want to play something and then get back to what you were doing uh so that's when i found target pool and it's just it's a super basic game it's got the the smaller flippers on it uh i have a ton of fun of playing that game. It's great to play against other people. You can explain the rules to somebody in 20 seconds and then just go from there. That will forever always be my go-to game whenever I want to play a game. And so now the price of Target Pool just went up by about 300 bucks. We ruined that years ago for that game. There was a year when we first started the Papa Circuit where we We literally drug that game around to every tournament because we used to go to most of the tournaments to either help stream them or help run them. And we would literally drag that game with us everywhere we want. And we were like, well, we brought a target pool for your tournament. And we made sure it was in like every event. Speaking of your go-to games, Jurassic Park, Keith, with these wonderful ideas of the mini mode that he's put in there, Do you foresee maybe Pimberg or Papa adopting some kind of new tournament based off of this timed five minute or less tournament style or mode that he has done? Oh, absolutely. I think that could happen. We used to run, we called them mini tournaments back in the Papa days where we do like split flipper or there was some really unique ones that people created there. like we had a World Cup soccer one where we we hooked up the flipper buttons to two soccer balls and you would kick these soccer balls to make the flippers go. And, you know, something like the speed runs that are in like TNA and stuff like that. I think that, you know, people could absolutely turn those into tournaments. I don't see a reason why not. Like, I don't think there should be you know and the ifpa is the arbiter of if you get whopper points or not but it doesn't mean you can't run a tournament that's not ifpa sanctioned and it will be fun like like something that people run a lot of times now you see that stall ball format which is basically just get a bunch of people together and when you shoot something that holds the ball you just switch players and if the ball drains on you you're out like something like that is a lot of fun like i don't see that ever being on a you know a thousand person tournament but like playing competitive pinball is inclusive of everything from pinberg to just playing against your friend that would be hilarious that would be hilarious to have a stall ball on the stage at pinberg you got one guy just in line it'd be hilarious all right well if you want to organize it i i we can make it happen okay that'll be the sunday afternoon when they're turning off the lights that should only take five days to run now when you guys move games you don't take the legs off right you just they're already set up and you just lift them up and move them in right yeah so for for pinberg when we move games we actually because there's so much to move we hire a local moving company that we have a contract with and they basically wheel them on the truck cover them with moving blankets strap them in and then bring them to the convention center where we pull them off and then we drop them into place wherever they go on the floor and and get them leveled it is not the way i would ever recommend anybody move a game however i don't think we could do what we do if we had to take the legs off of every single machine like personally for for collectors, take the legs off your games, fold it up, strap it down. Like I don't move any of my games like that. So I wouldn't recommend that. Do you have any games in your house right now? I don't have a game in my house. However, there's an Attack from Mars in my car. I just haven't brought it inside yet. Is it set up? It's not set up in my car. You can't play it in your car? It's actually a sad story because one of my locations is closing down because of the pandemic. And he's like, hey, man, you know, you got to come get this because we're not we're not going to continue to operate our business anymore. So I went and got it and it's sitting in the back of my car. I actually want to bring it in the house. I just have not done it yet. That's certainly heartbreaking. I know a lot of people who are really hurting with this. And and just a reminder, seriously, if you if it isn't within your means, go and sign up for the Pinberg ticket. I just got on the waiting list myself. I was able to log on and do it. And buy your ticket for next year if you can do it. And also buy some swag. Yeah. And even more locally, even if you don't care about the Replay Foundation or competitive pinball or anything if there an arcade or a barcade in your area that currently shut down because of everything that going on contact them and see if you can buy a t off of them or a gift card or anything like that Because you know you may not think your 20 bucks is going to help them very much but you know when it comes down to can I pay the electric bill this month when I've got no, no business coming in, like just, just beyond even the money coming in, just the, the physical fact of that, Hey, look, here's somebody who took time out of their day and, you know, called me and said, Hey, can I buy a gift card? Can I buy a T-shirt. Can I buy something like that? Like that actually helps, you know, give people confidence that when they can finally open their business up, you know, people are going to come and fill it up again. Well, and let's not sugarcoat it. I mean, we were talking to a couple of different people today and we won't say their business, you know, but they are arcades and they're in fear of shutting down. They they can't hold out much longer. And so please, please reach out to your local arcade, to the local operator or whatnot. Some of the operators are in a little bit better position than others, but if we want to see pinball keep going in the future, we need to support them now at this time of need. Yeah, we're going to lose some locations through this and every location lost. Believe it or not, I know even in Pittsburgh and I know some cities, there are locations that people won't visit because, oh, that operator doesn't keep their games up or whatever. and you know what once again we're kind of living in a golden age of pinball a lot of people at least if you're in a major city you have a good place to go play well-maintained games when i started playing on route you know you got what you got so like we would walk up to a game and if half the lights were out you know you still played it because that was pinball and while i don't want to say you know reward people for not taking care of their machines like you know any game out in the wild that works and people can at least see it to know that pinball still exists and it's still a thing that you can do, that could lead people to your local pinball league or the barcade that actually takes care of their machines or maybe even into competitive pinball or your local gaming show or whatever. Those people you want to bring into your community. If you don't want to go there and play, it's one thing, but just having a game sitting in a location that the public can see it and potentially play it and access it just lets people know that this is out there absolutely i totally agree i mean i've heard these horror stories where people like well they never take care of the machine so i went and bought a bunch of you know washers from the local hardware store shoved them in the coin mech so no one could play it's like dude like don't do that why like i get that your whirlwind the discs aren't spinning or you know the flipper is missing a rubber. So what? Let them play. Yeah. Let me tell you the best thing you can do in that situation. But from my personal perspective, like I said, when we started the PPL, it was super small and there weren't a lot of games on location. So what we would do is when we would go play those games for League, we would write up a list of the things that were wrong with them. We would give them to the bartender or the person that owned that establishment. And we would also tell them, hey, look, there's 14 of us here right now that want to play this game, and we're going to keep coming here, and we want to keep playing this game. Here's a list of things that we would like to see get fixed on this game, or if you guys can get a new game, that'd be awesome. Because in a lot of bars and stuff, if they're not geared towards being a pinball bar or something like that, that's just another entertainment option, and the owner doesn't know any more than the cut he gets from the machine if that game is playing right. You know, as if you're a pinball enthusiast, you know, take it upon yourself to try and educate them, you know, say, hey, look, this is we we are coming here as a group to play this game and eat your food and drink your beer and spend money in this establishment because you have pinball here. We just want to see this machine maintained better. We had a, you know, early on, we had a lot of success with that. Like I said, there weren't a lot of good locations in Pittsburgh. There were just bars with one or two games, and we would come in, and we would bring a group of people because we were playing as a league, and we would make the list, and then we would hand it to the bartender or talk to the owner. And a lot of times by the next week when we got out there, those issues were addressed because if they know that people are coming in to support their business because of pinball, they're going to make sure that pinball is set up the way that it's going to keep that business coming in. well and oftentimes these operators they they don't stop to check because they're there to pick up quarters they might flip a little bit but i mean i've operated pinball machines myself a little bit and you just don't know if the lights are on and there's quarters in the bucket you assume the game's working and so even nowadays when pinball's experiencing a resurgence they're making way more money off that jukebox that's sitting on the wall than they are off of that pinball machine. So like, as somebody who would be concerned about the business of doing that, you know, the jukebox not working is a big concern because it brings in $700 a week. The pinball machine that brings in 50, well, it's just not as big a concern because, you know, it's just not bringing in that much money. I only route pinball machines. So we're really focused on trying to keep those up and playing well. But we also rely on our local community to tell us when something's broken. Because like you said, you know, the owner doesn't necessarily know what's going on, you know, unless somebody tells him. So we try and, you know, communicate with the league and communicate with everybody. So when something's wrong, they'll let us know because I'm not in every establishment every week checking to see if everything's working right. But if someone messages me and says, hey, you know, the slingshot stopped firing on this game, we'll make it a point to get in there and get it fixed. well and i'll give you a perfect example if i can just just two seconds i've got a buddy that comes out he he routes pinball machines in my area but it's a it's like a two and a half hour drive to get out here and he has a creature from the black lagoon and the game plays perfectly up until you get into multiball and as soon as you start multiball the whole game just goes dead and then you've got to turn it off and turn it back on and you've lost your game you're frustrated because you just got to multiball, but you can't play it. Operators aren't going to sit around for 10, 15 minutes to get to multiball to figure that out. So please let someone know. I'm good friends with him, so I have his phone number. So I just text him, hey, get this taken care of, dude. You're not going to make any more money off this machine. So. Well, it's also when you are vocal about, hey, I like this about the bar or the or wherever it is the bowling alley. People will say, huh, people are here because they are, they're here. They may not be making as much money on the pinball machine, but guess what? They're selling food, they're selling drinks and people are coming through the door that you wouldn't have otherwise. Yeah. I mean, almost every time we put a game somewhere, it's all about, you know, the pinball machine is not going to, you know, I'm not, you're not going to put a pinball machine in the corner of your bar. And all of a sudden I'm giving you $2,000 a month as your cut from having that pinball machine there. You're going to see a growth as a business because that pinball machine will keep people in here for longer. And while they're there, they're going to be buying food and they're going to be buying drinks and they're going to be buying other things. They're going to be spending more time in your establishment because it's there. And I mean, that's the same way with most of the entertainment devices nowadays, like the dartboards and stuff like that. Most places, those aren't bringing in money. But if there's a league or there's organized play or something, then, you know, it's just those people are spending more time in your establishment, which means they're probably going to spend more money. Well, Doug, is, are there any other topics that you'd like to address? Uh, I want to hear more about you putting your foot through the floor of a trailer. Oh, geez. Um, okay. So no, you don't have to go into that. I'll tell you, we actually, this is, this is a good deal that goes, uh, that, uh, The universe has a sense of humor. I had this awesome Lightning McQueen bed. I wish it were king size because then I would have it. But it was twin size and it was really awesome. Well, my wife decided that my son who is nine has that bed. And my other son who is six was also in my daughter's room who is five. well he wanted to move over there a few years ago because a little closer in age they you know they would chit chat and play um and so we moved his it was a crib but we converted it to a day bed we moved it into her room but now they've all grown and he wants to go back and to have the boys room so we were we couldn't keep the lightning queen bed because now we have to have two beds in there so we had to get some uh some bunk beds so this was her thing that's like oh no it's time to move and i don't know i wasn't really on board because i i kind of liked the bed i kind of wished i could have it but we did find a friend who it's one of our friends our neighbors who she found were able to give this bed away and by the way this thing is like a tank if you put an engine in it you could drive it down the road um and it had an awesome trundle bed too but since it's so heavy, we had to break it apart. But as I was loading it onto their flatbed trailer, it was one of those old ones that had a wood floor. But you know, those trailers, there's like a few that usually have some rotted areas, or maybe some holes that they know about because they've used it forever. But since they actually, you know, and I had noticed it there, but I didn't really think much about it when I was moving that up I stepped on it and thankfully it was big enough that my foot just went straight down through but I didn't twist or anything but it wedged around my thigh because I've got I've got linebacker thighs so it's actually really good because if it was if if my legs were smaller I probably would be singing soprano because that was just would have gone straight up. Um, but so my, my leg fell down straight and just wedged around my thigh and we had to get some of those flexible cutting boards. So I had to shove them in there so I could get my leg out because it was stuck in there. Cause when we tried to pull, it was like the Chinese finger, finger traps. And, and so like I'm sitting out there and, but okay. My day jobs, I work at a hospital and we work with trauma all the time. And so I was thinking, you know, I could have broken my femur. I could have really screwed up my knee and I really could have broken my leg. And so of all things, I'm actually really lucky that I just got a really bad bruise and maybe scraped up my ligaments or tendons a little bit, but I didn't tear anything. So that was actually a good thing. But still, it was like we gave away this bed and I also got a huge leg injury from it. Well, I'm glad you're okay. I'm glad there's no permanent damage. Yeah, just my pride. And yeah, but seriously. You've got a good story out of it though. It's actually crazy. If you look at the, if you look at my Facebook update about two weeks ago, it looks like my leg was attacked by zombies. It is. I'm not kidding. I have a bruise from about, you know, where, well, about four inches below your crotch all the way down to your calf that is the bruise and it really does look like my legs about to go gangrenous and fall off well i'm glad it's not i know right it's crazy oh adventures in scott's life it's awesome i know i know oh yeah i just looked it up it looks like you got attacked by a shark i know right but did you scroll scroll all the way down and if you scroll all the way down you can actually see an update from today because i because i was getting a wart cut off the bottom of my foot a plantar wart this is this is like old person fun stuff where you know that's what we do it's like so that's exactly why everybody tunes in i know right yeah and so but if you look at the last picture i took that today because my leg was up there and i'm like oh i'll show a picture but it it looks like it's actually healing pretty well so I feel pretty lucky. Well, I'm glad you're recovering. Yeah. No, seriously, it would make my job horrible because I cannot do my job if I were in a crazy splint or a crazy external fixator because that's usually what happens if you really screw your leg up and you can't fix the bone that day. It's the worst. Oh, my goodness. Well, I got to bring up one thing because this is my shtick and I'm not going to talk about turtles. we're not going to do the Aquabats okay sorry yes we're going to okay Doug you've got to tell me you everyone doesn't believe me but well not everyone just Scott and Dennis Creasel but would you well Keith Ellen doesn't know who they are so I'll give him a pass so I hey okay dang it you've now got my train of thought off on something I'm like let's not do laundry to the Aquabats anywho Doug, do you think an Aquabats pinball machine would sell? It would sell to a very small number of people. Yes. As a general mainstream theme, probably not a good idea. But there would be a segment of the population that would pay for that. So you're telling me we should do it like Beatles numbers. Four. You could sell four. like 1900 of them but we saw them at a pro price i think it's a win-win come on i mean you might need to do you might need to do spooky pinball numbers i think even beatles numbers might be too high for that one how many are in the band because you could at least sell it to each band member and their mom okay hold on the current band members or how many has been their whole band uh well the people who are still with the band that haven't moved on because i was gonna say originally as a joke they started out with 14 people in their band okay well you started with the joke. And so if you did a pinball machine, that would be a joke. No, I'm in, I'm in for the Aquabats pinball machine though. You know what? Depending on pricing, I'm in. If you put that on stage at Pinburgh that the, the rarity and the demand for it will go through the roof. I mean, yeah. I mean, if, if anybody wants to sell a pinball machine, let me know. We'll find a way to promote it at Pinburgh. Well, awesome, Doug. We appreciate you coming on. We, you know, there's been a lot of speculation or not. So we appreciate you coming on and kind of giving us a better idea of what's going on with Pinburgh and Papa and all that jazz. Yeah, man. This has been awesome. You're welcome on the show anytime. Well, thanks for having me on. Yeah. Yeah. Wish you all the luck in Pinburgh. And, again, a plug for supporting your local people. They are hurting. Support your local event, whatever that's going to be, and just see if you can pre-purchase or you can purchase swag. You can get on Pinburgh. and certainly just again check out the friends of the show check out Flip N Out Pinball for all your pinball needs they've got good prices on all of the releases and also check out Lit Frames if you're looking for getting a way of blingifying your arcade man and I want to do a couple more shout outs too while you're at it thanks Zach Minney and Dennis Creasel for talking us up two episodes ago about our Sharp interviews it was awesome I know Scott felt a little awkward being called sexy so many times But hey, I appreciate it I don't mind that And then Also, Pinball Profile If you haven't listened to their most recent episode Or, sorry, not the most recent So I want to tell a really funny story really quick Zach told us we should get his mom on For Like, not make it a trifecta We should go for the four And Jeff Teels had reached out to us like a week before. He's like, just let you know, guys, for Mother's Day, I'm having Mama Sharp on. And so I'm like, sure, Zach. I'll see what we can do. I'm not going to take that away from Jeff. But Jeff, it was awesome listening to that episode, and thanks for having us on. Also, Final Round Pinball, they gave us a shout-out. Thanks, Martin. Thanks, Jeff Dias. You guys are awesome. That was fantastic. If you haven't listened to that episode, make sure the kids aren't around, and make sure you don't have speakers on at work because it's definitely explicit. I don't know what else to call it. And then super awesome pinball show. Christian, dude, you're the man. It was awesome. We're glad that you're enjoying the stuff. That was all Scott's doing though. Well, now Christian is Dr. Penn and his wife is Mrs. Penn. So check out her podcast too. But yes, they actually sent me some swag too and sent me some stuff for my wife, which was really awesome. So yes, it's all good in the pinball community. So, well, and they were on that recent episode of final round. Did you listen to that, Scott or Doug? I haven't had I've been home with my kids. And so unless I'm walking around with earmuffs, I can't listen to it with the family around. Yeah, I haven't listened to it yet either, but it's it's in my queue. So it's I had a two hour drive. We went I did a heating air conditioning system two hours away. Anywho, it was just funny to listen to this episode because these guys, they're playing a drinking game as they're doing trivia, pinball trivia. and I'm sitting in the van just going, this is the answer. Martin's like, what games give you an award for death saving? I'm like, Jurassic Park, Last Action Hero. And everyone's like, I don't know. I'm like, come on, people, you're killing me. But it was a great episode. Sorry, I get a little enthusiastic when it comes to pinball trivia. Well, you would have won. You would have been the only one left. Well, and I'm like, why didn't they invite us on? And then I realized, oh yeah, Scott and I don't drink. go in there with our cream soda or something like that. So if it were the caffeinated ones, I'd be, I'd be buzzing all night after that. So that would be funny to have you on Red Bull. Just bouncing off the walls. My heart would get palpitations. It would be horrible. Anyway, thanks again. Check us out. We have a few good interviews lined up. And so we will try to get that out as soon as we can, just so we can get everybody through this Corona virus sequesterization. and play more pinball. Also, we are Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. Check us out at Loser Kid Pinball Podcast at gmail.com if you want to send us an email. If you want to hit us up on Facebook, you can get a hold of Scott or me or maybe even Doug if he's a people person. I mean, he was nice enough to talk to us, so he might be nice enough to talk to you. And Doug, if they want to get a hold of you, how can they get a hold of you or the Replay Foundation? There's a contact us form. if you just have a general replay foundation question. If you have a specific Doug question you need answered, anybody can reach out to me at Doug at Papa.org. Awesome. And then we're on Instagram too. But honestly, we just post when our episode comes out. But yeah, I think that does it for us. What about you, Scott? I think that's it. My leg is feeling better, and I'm still on the hunt for a Beatles machine, a Jurassic Park, and apparently an Andromeda. Oh, and I might be selling Monster Bash soon. So if anyone's interested in Monster Bash, hit me up. All right. Thanks, Doug. Thanks for having me on. Shut up and sit down. Bye. _(Acquisition: groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: d735564e-829c-4e92-86be-0e01820c9f79*